


Wyvern Hunting

by decypress



Series: Crowns and Clowns [1]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 15:44:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19254220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/decypress/pseuds/decypress
Summary: A pair of novice Witchers attempt to hunt a wyvern. It goes really well!





	Wyvern Hunting

**Author's Note:**

> This is an unedited first draft. Fair warning

The twigs and branches in the campfire crackled, orange light filtering between the trunks around and dappling the leaves above, striking against the night sky. The smoke curled gently through the air, mixing with the faint scent of burnt pork, and the much more noticeable suffocating ethanol musk of alchemy.

“I _told_ you we needed more mistletoe!”

“No, no, it’s coming along fine, look.”

A pale hand reached for the flames and retrieved a skewer bearing several now-blackened yet juicy hunks of meat, as well as a few residual licks of flame. After whipping it through the air a couple of times to dispel the fire, the hand’s owner lifted the skewer to her mouth and tore off a chunk with her teeth, then jabbed it towards the alchemy pot.

“Since when was draconid oil that yellow?” she asked, between chewing.

Her partner put up her hands in frustration. “I wasn’t the one who bought the ingredients, was I?”

“I told you they didn’t have enough! We were supposed to look for the rest wild, on the way here!”

The second woman sighed through her teeth. She reached about behind her, passing over her twin swords, and picked up a small wooden box, its lid etched with a leaf. She deftly flicked open the copper clasp, unfolding the unassuming container on two wooden struts to reveal a short staircase of three layers of tiny jars, their contents a rainbow to the eye and, if they’d been uncorked, the nose.

After moving a hand uncertainly back and forth across the top layer, she tapped the cork of a jar of dried petals, which had been at some point marked with two colours – blue and white. “We could try using common myrtle instead?”

The first woman laughed, leaning against a stump as she worked her way down the skewer. “Myrtle? As a replacement for mistletoe?”

“What’s the problem?”

“Mistletoe’s active ingredient is _nigredo_ ; myrtle’s is _albedo_. Did you pay no attention in alchemy?”

“Hey -” she set down the box of jars with a glassy rattle - “At least I can tell the difference between a chort and a fiend, alright?”

 

The two women wore the enchanted medallions that marked them as witchers, professional monster slayers for hire. Extensively trained in the theory and practise of combat and magic, and given supernatural strength and agility by mutagenic alteration, witchers would drift around the lands taking on contracts to kill troublesome beasts – as long as the price was right.

The first, Rhodith, was a short but athletic woman. Her hair was frizzy and red, although it was already starting to show streaks of the white colouration that witcher mutation frequently caused. She wore a set of custom-fitted heavy plate armour she had had made in Novigrad in return for hunting a particularly nasty basilisk that had taken up residence in the sewers. It had been worth several hundred crowns at first, but the once-smooth plating was now scratched and dented from a hundred battles.

The second, Daria, was tall and rake-thin. She preferred light, loose armour, and unlike most witchers, wore her swords at her hip rather than slung across her back. She hid herself in a grey cloak most of the time, ostensibly acting as the intimidating presence while Rhodith talked rates with clients. When it came down to the metal, though, she was a frightfully resilient swordswoman; having once brought down a behemoth of a werewolf after fighting for almost an hour straight.

The two of them hailed from Kaer Seren, the School of the Griffin. By all accounts the first two female witchers to be trained in this antiquated, knightly establishment, they had a lot to prove when they went out to work for the first time, but they succeeded with flying – well, they succeeded. Most of the time. When they remembered to bring the vital ingredients for the monster poison they were planning to use.

 

“It’s turning red now,” Rhodith noted, indicating as such with her now-empty skewer. “Honestly, just dump it, clean the pot, and start again.”

“Start again?” Daria scowled. “We’ve already spread the lure.”

“That’s a point,” Rhodith conceded. “It’s not like we can just ask the wyvern to give us half an hour to finish up.”

An ear-splitting screech echoed across the hills.

“Speak of the devil, eh?”

Rhodith got to her feet, picking up her silver sword from the stump against which it lay, unsheathing it and slinging the scabbard over her shoulder. Next to her, Daria quickly packed the herb case away, wrapping it in her cloak and dropping it next to her backpack. She scrambled quickly to her feet and drew her own blade, which was patterned with blue runes. The two of them watched the sky carefully.

After a moment’s silence, Daria stepped carefully over to her backpack and withdrew two vials of Golden Oriole – an invaluable antivenom when dealing with wyverns, although it tasted like a mixture of medical ethanol and aniseed. Sharing a grimace, the two of them threw back the potion and shuddered.

Another scream came, this time closer by, followed by the sound of tree branches breaking and the deep ka-thump of a wyvern landing in the near distance.

Dropping the bottles, the two of them scattered, leaving their camp abandoned in the clearing. Rhodith ducked between two trees and nestled into a bush, whilst Daria hoisted herself up into an ancient oak, lithely climbing to the higher branches and crouching there like a hawk. Once in place, Rhodith raised a hand to her mouth, took a deep breath, and let loose the keening wail of an injured harpy.

In less than half a minute, the wyvern crashed through the trees into the clearing, coming to a halt by the campfire and sniffing the air in confusion. Leaning forwards on the claws at the tips of each wing, it took in the scent of the hazy steam rising from the alchemy pot, snarled in disgust, then turned to the now mostly-alight pork skewers in the campfire itself. For a moment, it raised a claw to try and scrape the meat free, but balked at the heat of the flames.

Frustrated, the wyvern huffed deeply. It turned on the spot with a rumble of steps, and wandered to the witchers’ backpacks to see if the tasty yet elusive harpy was hiding inside them. This led it, very conveniently, directly underneath the ancient oak Daria was hiding in. It’s almost – _almost –_ like that was the plan all along.

What hadn’t been accounted for in the plan was that jumping out of a tree made a lot of noise. As she leapt from the branches, Daria’s shifting weight created a susurration of rippling leaves, and the wyvern looked up with a shout. Neither combatant could react to the other’s movement in time, and what should have been a tremendous stomp onto its back became an undignified pratfall.

The two of them went head over heels, Daria landing sprawled across the wyvern’s back. It shrieked and bucked, flaring its wings to their full span and raking a talon across her jaw in the process. She was thrown to the ground with a cry, drips of blood splattering across the earth as she landed. The wyvern turned to face her, hissed, and received a firebolt to the side of the head.

Rhodith charged, her free hand still smoldering with magic, and brought her blade down with a shout onto the beast’s brow. It stumbled from the strike, blood in its left eye, and received a followup blow to the chest for its hesitation. It span away in a blind panic, thrashing its barbed tail against Rhodith’s trusty plate armour, and took to the air with a scream, bleeding as it went.

While the wyvern rose, Rhodith urgently helped Daria to her feet.

“You alright?”

Daria wiped blood from the wound and gasped. “Stings,” she replied, “Nothing too bad.” She wiped her fingers on her thigh and delved into a pocket, pulling out a small bottle of reddish-orange, syrupy liquid.

“It’s coming back around,” said Rhodith, taking up a defensive stance. Daria nodded and uncorked the bottle with her teeth, spitting it into the grass and throwing back the entire thing with a gulp. The familiar burning sensation of the healing potion spread through her body quickly, and her bleeding jaw began to ebb. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, threw aside the bottle, and grimaced as she raised her sword.

“It’s angry,” Daria said, as the wyvern circled overhead, screeching.

Rhodith rolled her eyes. “You don’t say?”

The wyvern swooped, talons bared. The witchers dived out of the way as it shot past at the speed of a crossbow bolt, and rolled deftly to their feet as it began to climb back up into the sky. The rush of air as it passed reduced the campfire to embers.

“I hear the Wolf School get to use crossbows now,” Daria said drily, stepping slowly across the clearing as she watched the wyvern fly.

“What, really?”

The wyvern circled overhead, turning to face them once more.

“Apparently it’s useful.”

The wyvern dived. Rhodith raised her sword into a position not unlike a baseball batter.

“Pathetic.”

It swept in once more. Daria dropped. Rhodith stepped quickly to the side, and swung her sword with teeth clenched.

The speed of the wyvern sent her sword flying end over end into the undergrowth, accompanied by an impressive spray of draconid’s blood. Rhodith herself was flung across the floor, collapsing into the pile of backpacks and supplies with an extended clatter. The wyvern had its screams cut short by a brutal crash-landing, rolling over and over and coming to rest by the ancient oak. Daria rolled to her feet perfectly fine, and gaped.

“What the hell was that?!”

Rhodith struggled to sit up, a hand clenched over her forearm. As the wyvern collided with her, its barbs, wet with venom, had shredded through her glove and skin. Her arm felt like a red-hot knife was jammed between the bones – so at least she knew the Oriole antivenom was working properly. It was usually blue!

Gasping heavily, she managed to choke out a reply. “A stupid idea!”

“Why did you _do_ that?”

Rhodith shrugged, then gasped in pain at the movement. “Didn’t think I’d get nicked on the way past.”

“It would have been pretty cool if you hadn’t.”

“Right?”

The wyvern staggered back to its feet and screamed. The impact of the sword had left a grisly wound across the left side of its head, which dripped blood across the grass as it turned to face the witchers with murder in its eyes.

Rhodith tried to lift herself up to her feet, but collapsed back onto the packs quickly from the pain. She gasped for breath, then looked to Daria apologetically.

“Looks like I’m gonna have to sit the rest of this out.”

Daria shifted her weight, watching the wyvern carefully. “No worries.”

Rhodith contorted her poisoned hand into a clawing thumbs-up. “You got this.”

The wyvern regarded the witchers with its one clear eye, the other blocked by a steady stream of blood from Rhodith’s ill-advised swing. Its gaze lingered on the incapacitated witcher, but flicked regularly back to Daria as she paced slowly towards it, spinning her sword in her hand.

Suddenly, it sprang into action, leaping towards Rhodith, apparently still hoping to get a meal out of this disastrous encounter. Before it could even reach her, though, Daria flashed forwards and struck it in the head with an upwards chop, stopping it dead in its tracks. It reeled from the hit, snarling furiously, and then lunged forward, sinking its teeth into her sword arm. Daria screamed as it clamped its jaws, tearing through her leather gloves like tissue paper, and rather understandably dropped her blade.

She still had one last advantage, though – the Swallow she had taken for the first hit was still in her system, and its strengthening effect meant a bite that would usually have met bone was reduced to a painful surface wound. She gritted her teeth, planted her heels into the dirt, and dragged the wyvern around her, hefting it into the air with the momentum. Its teeth slackened, and she hurled it with a grunt into the ashes of the campfire, where it landed on its back with a hefty crash.

Daria spat, looking around hastily for where her sword had landed, but to no avail. She turned back to the wyvern, as it scrambled to its feet in the fire pit, knocking aside the blackened logs, its lashing tail almost knocking over the alchemy pot and spilling the mixture.

Huh. Daria raised her bloodied arm and snapped her fingers, casting an Igni firebolt into the alchemy pot.

The clearing went white. An ear-splitting bang threw Daria off her feet into the grass, and stripped the nearest trees of their leaves. If the wyvern hadn’t already scared them off, flocks of birds would almost certainly have taken to the air in unison. The wyvern was blasted through the air in an arc, knocking down a poor birch tree with a crunch and tumbling to the floor in a heap. The explosion echoed across the forest, fading slowly.

Daria rubbed her forehead and quickly scrambled upright. As the dust settled, the wyvern was revealed – already back on its feet. They locked eyes across the clearing, and Daria tensed, preparing herself to dive for Rhodith’s steel sword.

It hissed at her, and then fled into the sky.

Daria turned to Rhodith, who was wiping the layer of disturbed dust from her face, and collapsed to the ground, heaving for breath. Rhodith swore after the wyvern a few times and made a very rude hand gesture, then remembered moving her hand was currently intensely painful and swore a few more times.

“I can’t believe we let it slip,” Daria finally managed, once her breath had returned.

“It’s a tough one. Royal, probably,” Rhodith said, before gulping down a second bottle of Golden Oriole. The two of them looked back up at the sky, which was now clear of anything but the first rays of daylight.

“Should be easier to get it the second time. It can’t take much more punishment.”

“And we can?”

“We have Swallow,” Daria grinned. Her facial wound had already healed to a white scar under the potion’s influence, and her arm wounds had already clotted to a drip.

“We do,” laughed Rhodith, flexing her arm as the venom began to neutralise. “Until we run out of bottles, that wyvern ain’t going anywhere.”

They looked at the sky.

“Well, anywhere further than where it’s nesting.”

They sat and watched as the sun crested the horizon, waiting for their wounds to be healed by the miraculous chemical cocktail.

“Do you wanna tell the client we screwed up the first day or just say it didn’t show up?”

 

As the sun span lazily up into the sky, the two witchers alternated between resting by the firepit and pacing slowly around the clearing, waiting to be rejuvenated by their potions. Rhodith discarded her shredded glove, stretching and massaging her arm to relieve the knots of tension the venom had tied her muscles into. Daria picked through the underbrush and recovered their silver swords, cleaning them of blood and dirt with an alcohest-soaked rag and returning them to their sheaths.

By mid-morning, their injuries had all but faded. From looking at the pair, the only signs of damage were their torn, blood-splattered clothes, and the near-invisible white scars of what had been profusely-bleeding wounds scant hours before. Swallow was indeed a miraculous healer, so long as you’d been through the witcher mutations. If you hadn’t, you’d be safer relying on a bracing draught of bleach.

As noon approached, Rhodith kicked the ashes of their campfire aside, Daria draped her cloak and pack across her shoulders, and the two of them set off in the direction the wyvern had flown. The air was warm, and the birds were singing. Tracking the wyvern would have been difficult, but the deep wounds they’d inflicted upon it meant that every dozen yards or so a splatter of dried blood across the ground marked its path.

“Hey, over here!” Rhodith called, slipping away between the trees. Daria followed to find her holding up a mangled scrap of black iron. It took her a second to recognise it.

“Oh man. I really should have thought that one through.”

“It’s fine,” Rhodith laughed, turning their former alchemy pot over in her hands and inspecting the damage. “It’s just a bit of pewter. Forty crowns to replace at most.”

“I should have written down what was in there,” said Daria, biting her thumbnail. “Probably would have made a decent base for a bomb.”

“Well, try not to ruin the next pot re-discovering the recipe.” Rhodith dropped the hunk over her shoulder, and they set back to walking.

  


After almost a league, they reached a much larger pool of blood. The wyvern had stopped in a rocky clearing to tend to its wounds, and had stuck around to rest for some time as well. Despite the wyvern’s lack of higher reasoning, Daria still found herself scanning the treetops. Just in case. Turnabout is fair play, after all.

Rhodith stepped around the bloodstain and pointed to a nearby ditch, from which several red-streaked bones were poking. “Carcass,” she observed. “It was here long enough to catch breakfast.”

“Blood’s still damp in places,” Daria replied, running her fingertips across the ground. “It left here quite recently.” She stood up, wiped her fingers clean, and stepped back, taking in the whole scene as Rhodith crouched over the ditch and picked up one of the bones.  S he started turning over the rest of the bones with it, inspecting the carnage.  She whistled.

“Looks like it was pretty angry. I can’t even… Do you have any idea what this thing was?”

Daria looked up from the bloodstain at the mess of bone and meat. “Looks like… horse?”

“I think it might be multiple things?” Rhodith turned the bone around in her hands, sniffed it, then dropped it back into the heap and stood up.

Daria waved a hand at the wyvern’s bloodstain. “It looks like we did more damage than we thought, anyway. The bleeding should have slowed more than this by now.”

“Any idea which way it went?”

After a moment looking around, Daria snapped her fingers and pointed out two sets of short, but deep grooves in the dirt, starting wide and coming to a point.

“Take-off talon marks. It went northeast.”

They set off in pursuit, and quickly found themselves breaking free of the forest and crossing a forgotten, mossy stone wall into a set of overgrown fields. From the wall, the ground sloped downwards into a valley, then back up on the opposite side to a steep hill, at the peak of which was a crumbling tower. Just visible on the sun-bleached white stone was a vertical line of fresh scarlet connecting the roof to the ground, and if that weren’t enough indication, the witchers could just catch a glimpse of the sun glinting off the deep purple scales of a draconid.

“Looks like we’ve found our nest.”

  


They climbed the tower in silence, or as close to it as they could manage through the creaking floorboards and wailing door hinges. As they reached the top, the musk of rotten meat and droppings marked their proximity to the beast’s nest. The wind whistled through the cracks in the tower’s masonry, and the rotting wooden boards groaned concerningly under their shifting weight.

They finally reached the hatch to the roof, a set of light wooden slats between the dim interior and the open air. They moved into position beneath it, and began to prepare for their final surprise assault.

Rhodith glanced out of a shattered window. “Best not fall off,” she whispered.

Daria peeked around her partner at the view, from which they could see miles across the fields and forests. “You don’t say?”

She unlatched the trapdoor carefully, holding it in place just in case it opened downwards. Rhodith raised her hand and held it just below the wood, her fingers in the starting position for an Aard spell. They each took their free hands and gripped the hilts of their silver blades.

Daria hissed a countdown. “Three – two – one -“

The explosive shockwave of the Aard sign blew the trapdoor off its hinges, as well as into multiple fragments, scattering across the fields on the wind. Rhodith immediately followed it, leaping up the stepladder to the roof, unsheathing her sword with a battle cry as she went. She was met with silence.

“Oh! It’s dead.”

There was a moment of processing, then she threw her hands into the air.

“Whoo!”

Daria poked her head up through the hatch.

“That’s good. Because I didn’t mean go on _one,_ I meant go on _go._ ”

They approached the wyvern carefully, although playing dead wasn’t something they did. Its debilitating wound from Rhodith’s reverse kamikaze was now dripping slowly, and it showed no sign of breathing. Rhodith raised her sword slowly, and poked it in the side of the head. It slumped slightly, and didn’t otherwise react.

“Just succumbed to the injuries,” Daria said, folding her arms and surveying the body.

“Poor forest creatures,” Rhodith said, picking some of the fur from its talons. “Wyverns are so vindictive.”

“Poor forest _people_ ,” Daria added. “The village will be a lot safer without it around.”

They hauled the corpse into the center of the rooftop, and Rhodith took out her knife and began to skin it. The head would be brought back as proof of the contract’s fulfilment, of course, but a wyvern’s body contained several useful alchemical ingredients, so the witchers weren’t about to let it go to waste.

As Rhodith sliced away at the body, Daria took a closer look at the piles of branches and meat that the wyvern had stacked into a nest. It had been living here for a while, clearly, as the piles of food were high and – wait, weren’t wyverns the best?

She looked closer. Pushing aside the branches, she discovered a single orange egg, around the size of a watermelon.

“Bugger.”

Rhodith looked over. “Ah! An expecting mother.”

“Yep. Must have been stockpiling food to care for the hatchling when it arrived.”

Daria drew her sword. “Best nip this one in the bud.”

She raised the sword over her head, and the shell cracked. First one claw, then the second broke through, and the cracks spread across the top half of the shell. Then, it fell loose, revealing the tiny, pink face of a wyvern chick.

Daria blinked.

The chick shook itself free of the shell and looked around. It was a clumsy, silly thing, its head still tremendously large proportional to its body. Its scales were a light pink hue, almost the colour of bubblegum, and its horns were stubby and blunt. Its round, yellow eyes suddenly rose to Daria’s face, her sword still raised overhead, and it squeaked happily, tottering forwards and rubbing its jaw against her shin.

“What’s going on over there?” Rhodith said, turning away from a particularly troublesome vertebrae. “Are you going to – oh my god.”

“I don’t know what to do!” yelped Daria, dancing around as the baby wyvern chittered and began attempting to climb her leg. “Help!”

Rhodith sat back and guffawed. “Oh my god!”

“Don’t just sit there! It’s – oh god, it’s slobbering on my shoes!”

“Oh my god!”

“Stop saying tha- agh!” The wyvern had leapt up and snapped at her belt. Her arms lowering fitfully, not sure what to do with her sword, she slapped ineffectually at the enthusiastic creature with her off-hand and ended up collapsing to her side. It tromped triumphantly across her body, perched on the side of her head, and licked her face.

“Oh my god, it looks like that little baby has taken a liking to you!” Rhodith managed, through tears of laughter. “You’re gonna have to give it a name.”

“I can’t give it a name!” Daria sat upright, batting the wyvern off her. It bounced around her on the floor, nibbling at the seams of her armour and chirping gleefully. “I killed its mother!”

“Well, yeah – that means you _are_ its mother now.”

“That’s not – that – what?”

“You break it, you bought it!”

Daria gave the chick an icy stare. It looked back at her, its head cocked slightly to one side.

“I was going to kill it,” she said.

Rhodith leant over and lifted its tail, peeking underneath. “Her,” she said helpfully.

Daria looked back and forth from Rhodith to the chick, her face turning red.

“Still want to kill it?” Rhodith said with a grin. The chick looked at her, then back to Daria, and warbled.

“… We’ll see,” Daria muttered, sitting back. “We can _not_ let the peasants see her with us, though.”

“Oh god, you’re right there. Also, thanks for reminding me I need to finish taking the head.” Rhodith turned back to the corpse of the adult wyvern and went back to work, her knife audibly scraping the bone of a neck vertebrae as the chick looked on in mild interest. Then, she turned back to her mother.

The chick trilled in glee as Daria reluctantly held out her arm, quickly stepping on and balancing with its wings. Its wingspan was already almost a meter wide.

Daria sighed deeply, and gave Rhodith a sidelong look. While her partner was facing away, she lifted her hand to the chick and gave it a gentle scratch between the horns, much to its delight. It trilled once more.

“Oh, you’re going to be so much trouble, aren’t you,” she said apprehensively.


End file.
